ABSTRACT
Philology also highlights the fact that, far from being a universal datum of human experience, the concept of ‘nationalism’ with its revolutionary populist implications has a highly nuanced history as we move from society to society. In their respective developments as political theories, too, nationalism’s contradictory manifestations as both a liberal and an illiberal force is a history of parallel lives or cohabitation rather than degeneration or succession. The Eurocentrism and illiberalism implicit in the nationalist assumptions of Western statesmen such as de Charles de Gaulle are thrown into particularly stark relief when they are contrasted with those of one of the most important revolutionary theorists of Southern nationalism, Frantz Fanon. The mythic dimension of nationalism has been highlighted by Benedict Anderson who has studied the complex process by which the modern nation comes into being as an ‘imagined community’, inconceivable before the secularization of society, the rise of vernacular languages and the spread of modern communications.
